Deborah Devonshire, the youngest Mitford sister, talks about her extraordinary life

the title the title was fairly obvious if you're the youngest of seven children and you're about two and just learn to talk sort of you can't keep up it was always me wait for me wait for me because my poor stubby legs couldn't go quick enough don't you think that when you're a child you just take what you know and you think it's perfectly normal that other children and other families are just like yours i adored nancy and i was her postman when she wanted to write letters to people she wasn't supposed to be writing to the constant one for me was decca my next sister jessica who i could not be without my sister unity she didn't like what was going on at the table or she thought yeah she thought something was wrong with with the chat she used to slam silently very very slowly down onto the table the hell of a disappear and then when she thought the coast was clear she'd come up again and my mother and paul took absolutely no notice at all when poor nancy grew up and some university undergraduates came from oxford she he shouted down the table to my mother have these people know homes of their own which made everybody feel extremely uncomfortable except my mother who understood exactly what he found so i still have chickens i do indeed but when i was little i had them for purely commercial reasons because pocket money was pretty dim and i thought i'd sell some eggs to my mother and she was very understanding she gave me the food and bought the eggs and the food is the big the big expense when you're looking after them yourself i first met andrew in april 1938 when we were both just 18 and we met at a dinner party a very ordinary way of meeting then because the fame is coming out which has a slightly different meaning now and in those days you were not meant to dance twice with the same person the conventions were so and it's quite incredible to think of now but that's how it was and so we somehow did so that we've been headed not one huge house but five or six i was then in charge of all those houses that's why i put housewife on my form that i had to fill up for the sat in the other they say occupation i put housewife wife of five or six enormous houses you

Channel: John Murray Books

Views: 189,815

Keywords: mitford, duchess of devonshire, Deborah Devonshire, memoirs, Chatsworth

Id: DSAbSRcsUcY

Length: 3min 34sec (214 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2010